Beauty fights dirty

Dining with a friend tonight in a busy West Hollywood restaurant. She makes the comment, “There’s lots of pretty women here but almost no good-looking men.” I took a wide sweep of the crowd (including a glance of myself in a large mirror) and had to agree. Among the fabulous hips and breasts and smooth skin and cheekbones there was scarcely a man who would seem to rate one of these slim and sexy creatures. Drab, ordinary, older with failing pates, the men in the room were like the plain walls on which great works of art are hung, there to support but not attract to attention whatsoever.

And it’s so meanly unfair for both genders.

I studied what it took for a woman to produce herself as the amazing desirable thing she may be: the makeup perfecting the skin, enlarging the eyes, filling the lips and concealing everything from small lines, to enlarged capillaries, to gaping pores and offending blotches of pigmentation. The cleverly built bras and underwires, cup fillers and cleavage makers, body shapers and breakthrough stretch materials, and nose-bleed heels that lend height and sexiness where a squat, flat-footed profile wouldn’t. Hair color to rid the hated gray, jewelry to restore the sparkle of youth threatening by the minute to abandon its host. Then there is the sheer cost and TIME devoted to a hopeless attempt to freeze an image.

Men aren’t so fortunate when it’s simply an evaluation of the packaging that’s publicly at stake. For men the game of raw attractiveness is more a matter of retention than enhancement. Women are quick to notice the color blending, the ludicrous styling techniques for reducing an ebb tide hairline, the preposterous muscles that make short men wider, not taller and, heaven forbid, the suicidal Faustian resort to ill-fitting toupees and Hair Club For Men. There is little they can do but make the most of what they have. And that’s where the shiny objects of success are offered when the gifts of nature disappoint.

But how would it do if “come as you are” was the rule of beauty? How would the room stack up in comparison if all that stylish construction had to be left at the door? Men and women simply show up with what they’ve got—no paint, tint, supports, stitches, or impossible placement of hair. What would we see?

I can tell you exactly what that would be: one empty room.

Beautiful.

Douglas Preston

How to look 10-years younger in only 10-days! Nothing to buy!

It’s remarkable really. There I was at a beautiful Scottsdale resort after a day training a spa team, fully ready to relax and enjoy 2-hours and 3 glasses of wine by an outdoor fire pit on a warm, clear evening. This is a very old ritual as deeply established as coffee in the morning. But, when the server came I ordered the coffee instead, plus a glass of water. And that was it—I was and am done, just as I was with cigarettes 33-years ago, meat 31-years past and a couple of pleasurable but personally costly delights now about two decades behind me. No support groups, no steps, no trembling desire to reverse course. Just done. And in these 10 glorious days since saying goodbye to the vintage streams from Napa Valley and the Loire, suddenly I am hearing about how much younger I look, astonishingly so. Lines receded, puffiness flattened, color improved and not to mention the energy from longer sleep, mornings without regret, and body hydration restored. No laser or peptide could do as much in so little time, and those treatments don’t save you the money that an alcohol-free life does, particularly if your monkey is a pedigree, not a mutt.

Reading The Star Machine, by Jeanine Basinger, I saw the steady decline of the hard-living, harder drinking Errol Flynn—the beautiful and athletic actor turned flabby and sagging victim of everything Hollywood, dead and derided at 50. He was not beautiful at the end, but also not granted enough time to accomplish the Barrymore-esque damage that was slated on the production schedule. Finis.

Now, I do hope you realize that I am not a one-man temperance movement, nor recommending my approach to life for anyone still here and living theirs. I loved Cabernet, and Pinot Noir and Champagne as well as any other man or woman that drinks them does. Still, there was a season for that and then the fall arrived. Sometimes it’s better not to be “in like Flynn.”

We’re beautiful,

Douglas Preston

Another dating site refugee… me

I knew it going in, writing that thick, unembellished bio, choosing the right photos from my files, casting myself like bait out into the sea of…love… The haul after 20-months of this: the searching, rejecting, rejections and a handful of regrettable “dates” was a net full of everything but what I and most others there signed up to find. A couple of life-long friends and the conviction that nature’s work in pairing people cannot be replicated by engineered romance. The mind and heart need time and repeat exposure to build the slow but certain realization that a suitable mate can be discovered beneath the costume of our fantasies and split-second coffee shop judgment.

I’ve been in love, truly in love, only twice: once with a young woman I accidentally met while briefly working in a gift shop a friend needed some help with, and the second time with a woman whose co-workers bought her a spa appointment and insisted that it be with me. No planning, no selling, no dreaded meetup, no subscription fee. Just nature doing what it does so well: turning the unexpected into the extraordinary.

So I leave MisMatch.com and open the hours spent scrolling through a thousand deceptive thumbnails for a free swim in public waters. That’s where it will happen again, and I recommend it to you, too.

Beautiful you,

Preston

A thing of beauty

Professional estheticians are steadily alienating themselves from the idea of performing “fluff” or “pampering” facial treatments. And this is a great mistake. When you ask a facial client what they remember most about their time reclined in that little private room under the soothing hands of a skincare professional most of them will report the same thing: relaxation. Now, why is that after all of the washing and peeling and masking and pore extracting that went on in that hour or so of service?

It’s simple: people are massively stressed and unable to fix it on their own.

And what does all that stress do to the body? For one (and enough for one) it causes the adrenal gland to release elevated levels of the naughty hormone cortisol. In normal amounts this cortisol isn’t such a bad boy as it assists in carbohydrate, fat and protein metabolism. But, pump it up a few notches and you have some nasty influences on your hands, things like suppressed T-cell production, reduced collagen replacement, diminished bone formation and internal inflammatory effects, these just for starters. Want to know why presidents turn grey so quickly after election? Cortisol, that’s why. Any president that didn’t lose his hair color in the first few years of office was sleeping on the job.

So, that “fluff” facial you had? If it got you to relax and rest, to lift the crush of the world on your poor little mind even for the better part of an hour, then you probably had more anti-aging benefit than any product or gadget could ever produce. Lowering that flood of cortisol is one of the most important things you can do to preserve your health, your memory and your remaining youth. When I see my clients float out of that room with eyes at half-mast and an angelic smile then I know something profound happened and that life seems all the better when someone remembers how good it used to feel to feel good. I can peel you to near bleeding but only a deep quieting of the mind can bring inner peace, and I don’t know of anyone who can’t use more of that.

By the way, to learn more about what I do in world of skincare please visit:

http://douglasprestonskincare.com/

You’re beautiful,

Douglas Preston

Time it was and what a time it was, it was…

It goes like this:

…back then

…I used to

…we had

…years since

…in those days

…there was a time

…when I was young

…if I remember correctly

…I can’t do that anymore

…a long time ago

…it’s all in the past now

I’m closing down this computer and walking out into the sun. So should you…

…beautiful you,

Douglas Preston

The Oscars: Check your lipstick at the door?

Incoming!!!

The clothes: amazing! The jewelry: understated and elegant. The hair: from Veronica Lake to thrown in the lake. The makeup: where’s the lip color? Eyes to die for and then a dead mouth hanging below them. Even Kirk Douglas was refurbished for action better than some of the announcers and winners. I admit that a pale pink but natural mouth is more appealing than the ubiquitous LA grouper in open wound vermilion. Reese Witherspoon’s makeup was all wrong for her beautifully cute face. Her small round eyes needed enlarging with emphasis on the outsides. Her mouth was nowhere to be found. It was as if she marched out onstage with an earring missing or wearing comfortable shoes under that gown. I wanted to jump through the TV screen (you are shocked, of course, that I didn’t have a front row seat at Kodak) and paint her up right there. In fact, that might have made the whole event a little more interesting. At least Randy Newman’s goofy piano number permitted a convenient carrot cake break and a trip to the grass for Petey. Now, that’s not entertainment.

But, back to point. Lipstick is magic! Lipstick is glorious! Nothing is sexier on the rim of a cocktail glass or the tip of a white cigarette filter than those luscious ruby imprints (provided that the glass didn’t already have one when the bartender delivered your cosmo. You asked for it dirty, didn’t you?) “Barely there” isn’t an enhancement unless you’re 14-years old, still equipped with plenty of natural lip luster, and heading to your first dance. Sure, bright or deep color is a pain to keep up. Yes, it can smear the teeth or ruin a silk blouse or get a bad boy murdered. But, this is beauty, the thing that people bleed and suffer and plunge into debt to acquire or preserve! So, what’s a little Pantone panache in contrast to all that? Go for it and be beautiful, show-stopping, controversial, hot!

The boys and girls of Madison Avenue or Barney’s makeup counters are breathlessly awaiting your compliance 🙂 Not to mention, me.

You’re beautiful so be beautiful.

Douglas Preston

Beauty is where you least expect to find it

During my morning walk with Petey we encountered Freida Berger who asked about Pete’s age. She then cheerfully began to tell me about her life.

85, Romanian Jew, sent with her family to a concentration camp from which only she returned, speaks 8 languages, a teacher, financially comfortable, full of life and positive spirit. Asked for my friendship. She told me that she had been tattooed in the concentration camp, saying proudly, “I was prisoner 42,503 and my sister was 42,504.” Having never seen one of those infamous tattoos before I asked if I could. Freida pushed up her sleeve and revealed it to me, an evil mark that she would never dream to have removed. She told me about her travels, her accomplishments, her late husband, many friends and even hopes for the future. And she had a life-time membership to a health club which she was heading to when encountering Petey and me. Frieda said that she liked dogs but so many dogs in America were treated far better than many humans living here, and almost anyone living in Romania during her youth. She now spends her time cooking for and helping others in need, working every day toward that purpose. And she invited me to her home here in LA to see her little museum of her life and the world she’s lived in, one fascinating episode after another. “You see, there is always something of value available to you wherever you go and today it was meeting you!” Freida announced with a wide smile. “Hitler took away my family but he couldn’t take my mind!” Of course I will visit her. She said, “When you call you must remind me that you are the fine man with the handsome dog I met when I went for my workout or I might not remember you.”

This woman, now very late in age, weathered more tragedy and challenge in a single year of her life than I have in the sum of mine. And she is one of the most remarkable persons I’ve ever met.

If I ever complain about anything again I will think of Freida and get over it immediately. That is beauty.

And so are you,

Douglas Preston

10 Things You Should Never Accept In A Spa Or Salon

A loyal customer is all that a service business can hope for. Are you being rewarded with due appreciation? Here’s my way of measuring the quality of a beauty service business. Find any of the offenses below and turn on your heels. You deserve better and it’s out there for you.

1. Rude treatment. If you don’t feel welcome, you’re not. A service business should not have the customer care credo of, “Hello. Why should I help you?”

2. Animals. I love dogs and cats, but not in spas, salons or restaurants. They should not be running around in them and, incidentally, it’s illegal for them to. I once briefly tolerated a hair salon that had a small mixed-breed thing in a pink bejeweled collar visiting the busy stations. When my stylist reached down and scratched the thing’s head and then returned directly to mine that was enough, and the end.

3. Filth. Dead flies on window sills, dusty products and shelves. A dirty toilet. Fingerprints on walls and doors, air vents with black beards. Grimy professional products and equipment. My advice? Walk away. If you can see trouble in plain sight imagine what might be hidden from view!

4. Excuses and defensiveness. If you have a service problem or complaint you should expect spa and salon personnel to listen with care and openness. Now, if YOU are the problem (“I was expecting Brad Pitt to do my massage, not Steve Buscemi!”) then you need to go home and call your therapist.

5. Lack of truly personal service. I mean, when is the “personal” supposed to begin? Do you feel like you’re important to your spa therapist or “Jeff, your 4:00 is here”?My name is Preston, not 4:00 h/c.

6. Gratuity bondage. Are you afraid that if you don’t tip liberally you might get shot in the back when leaving the spa? Have you ever seen a little sign on a hairstylist’s station that reads, “Tipping Is Not A City In China!”? I say to duck and run! Call me old fashioned but I believe that gratuities are still what they began as: a little gift to a service provider for care beyond the call of duty, not simply a fee for delivering the minimum that was expected (and paid for.) Tips are not entitlements. No one should ever forget that. And, built-in tips for service personnel is one of the worst ideas ever concocted! Why should you be required to pay a gratuity in advance for something you might not receive? It’s humiliating to ask for a tip rebate once you’ve prepaid it—businesses know this. Don’t accept it.

7. Inappropriate communication. This can range from job complaints to secret attempts to “steal” your business away from a professional’s place of employment, making you feel uncomfortable and complicit in the scheme. Also, if the service provider is talking to you about their next career and you’re feeling like the last undesirable customer they have to work on, get off the table and demand your money back.

8. Constantly having your appointment changed. If your hairstylist, esthetician or massage therapist can’t go two weeks without bumping your appointment then bump your professional. You’re being abused at a high price. Move on.

9. Groupon grumpiness. An introductory incentive is something we all like but when your service provider makes sure you know how much he or she dislikes the “cheap” you then it’s time to pay full price to get full service. When employees are “stuck” with you, slither free. Many spa employees feel put upon when asked or required to perform complimentary (promotional) or heavily discounted services. Do you want to be in those resentful hands? Not me. You should use that Groupon or other offer if it’s attractive enough but make sure that you don’t get reduced respect along with the price.

10. A bad vibe. You may not be able to quite put your finger on it but the place you expected to feel good in just isn’t doing it. Something’s wrong and you know it: sullen staff, whispering and giggling receptionists, or customers that don’t leave smiling. Take it from me, a man that’s spent years behind the sometimes frosty doors of the employees’ break room, what you feel is what you have. Never obligate yourself to endure an experience that’s miles from what you were counting on. Most towns have more than enough spas and salons hungry for your business. Give the most to those that give the most back, positively speaking.

You’re beautiful,

Douglas Preston

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moisturizing your skin: some things to consider

If I may have your attention for a moment… You’d probably consider yourself a normal consumer, one who doesn’t want to get too scientific about moisture products, hard drives or brewing beer. But, for you beauty product addicts I would bet that when it comes to moisturizers you do prefer at least some of the following:

1.     A product that works, meaning, makes the skin feel soft, hydrated and look younger.

2.     A choice that’s easy to use, smells and feels pleasing, sold in a quality package and doesn’t require a credit application to purchase.

3.     One that won’t cause a skin outbreak.

Should be simple enough, right? But, given the thousands of options, retailers, brands, philosophies and miraculous promises how can you ever know if you’re about to buy the right thing until you’ve put your money down? Will a small sample be enough to properly judge the product? If you try one sample against another won’t there be some crossover influence? Will anyone rent you one of these things for a week or so?

If you’ve been reading this blog for the little while you could read it you already know that, skincare expert I am, I don’t parade around with lofty beliefs and ideas about what products will do for you. Truth is, most of the skin improvement potential available in a treatment product is never realized simply because the user won’t reliably comply with application instructions. You know how that is, some nights you’re just too tired, too lazy, too drunk or too far away from your beauty goop to do the routine. It’s like a health club membership in a jar…

But, that skin of yours needs water to look and feel its best, even oily skin as oil isn’t water (but contains a little of it) and an oily, dehydrated face isn’t all that pretty. As we age (sorry to bring this up again) the outer dead skin layer, the one that protects us from pathogenic attack and some ultra-violet harm, loses its ability to retain water. Thus, it has diminished elasticity, tends to shrink in the way a grape becomes a raisin, and develops on a dull, decidedly older appearance. And, you’re hating it. Of course, being an advocate of professional beauty advice I’m going to send you right out to the esthetician for some better-than-average products.

And, while you’re shopping here are some good things to look for in a moisturizer:

• sodium PCA (potent humectant that lures water to itself and holds it captive for awhile)

• hyularonic acid (another potent humectant.) I prefer the yeast-derived sodium or phytohyaluronate because that other stuff is sucked out of slaughterhouse roosters. I like chickens and, if you’ve ever raised them like I have, you come to understand that they can be a lot smarter than some of those who eat them.

• collagen (skin softening and moisture-binding) Again, I prefer yeast-derived collagen sources.

• any anti-oxidant, from vitamin C to alphalipoic acid. These don’t add moisture but they do help protect the skin from environmental damage—nice friends to have at the party.

• seed oils that help make the skin supple and lock moisture underneath.

Of course, if your skin is oily or acne prone you’ll almost certainly want to avoid the following troublemakers:

• isopropyl or myristyl myristate: a chemical used to give products lightness and slip but will congest the skin and cause an acne reaction in many

• methicone, dimethicone, or, hell, just about any cone! These are silicone-based polymers that offer slip and shine to products and the surfaces they’re applied to such as skin and hair. But, these beauty devils can also clog pores and create acne (beware hair conditioners because they’re just rife with these bad boys.) Now, if your skin is bone dry and not prone to congest, Methicone can feel pretty nice on it and make it look healthy, too. Still, I don’t know how many times I’ve had to harvest the stuff from clients’ pores in the treatment room, especially at the hairline or down the back.

•paracohoxyzylomithianateflorolamate: As far as I know it hasn’t been invented yet but when it comes, skip it.

Wait a sec, how come I didn’t mention SPF? I’ll tell ya in a later post.

Now, go get moist and beautiful.

Douglas Preston

Prestonbeautyblog

Q & A for Douglas Preston, skincare professional

Facial Treatments by Douglas Preston: Just the facts

Q: Are facial treatments really worth the cost?

A: It depends on your goal. If you’re looking to achieve the benefits of a facelift, eyelift or any other major repositioning of facial skin and muscle my work won’t do produce that. Estheticians are professionals that concern themselves with the aesthetic details of your skin, that is, the subtle refinements that have a big impact on its overall appearance. Enlarged pores, acne congestion and blackheads, uneven texture, chronic dehydration and flakiness and many more undesirable conditions can be successfully corrected through well-performed treatments and an appropriate home care routine.

Q: I heard a plastic surgeon on television say that facials and treatment products will do very little to turn back the aging process. Is that true?

A: Absolutely! You are the age you are and I can’t change that. However, I can make skin of any age appear younger by helping to stimulate its vitality and create a better texture. For most people with appearance concerns these improvements are very satisfying and well worth the service fee.

Q: I’ve broken out after facials before and my esthetician told me that it was caused by impurities coming up through the skin as a result of the facial. Does that always happen?

A: The first time I heard that explanation for this common post-treatment skin reaction I knew it wasn’t credible. No one has been able to tell me what those so-called “impurities” are, where they were before somehow magically coming up through the skin, and why they didn’t cause a problem before the facial. It’s a widely believed but silly idea. That outbreak is usually caused by massage crème or oils left on the skin after that part of the treatment is performed. The heavy lipids driven into the skin under the pressure and heat of massage create an acne-favorable environment that creates the reaction, lasting several days until the skin and your own cleansing finally purge itself of that material.

The skin can also experience follicular irritation from enzyme exfoliators, alphahydroxy peels and facial waxing. A truly skilled esthetician will understand fact from fiction and know how to greatly minimize post-facial breakout. It almost never happens in my treatments because I make sure that the underlying causes are eliminated during the facial itself.

Q: If I’m using antibiotics or Acutance can I still have a facial treatment?

A: The answer is yes but your skin must be handled with the most delicate care. Acutance thins the skin making it extremely susceptible to damage. Antibiotics are attempting to help the body control the bacterial invasion causing infectious lesions. Unfortunately, many people are using antibiotics to fight the effects of incorrect skincare products—this I see all of the time. Worse, when you use these drugs your own body will relax the production of its own natural antibodies (why work when you have someone else willing to do the job?), leaving you depleted at the end of the therapy.  We’ll talk…

Q: Every time I get a facial the technician bombards me with a pile of products to buy. Are you going to do this, too?

A: You know, I tell estheticians in training classes everywhere that clients never need any of the products we’d prefer them to use. After all, where couldn’t they find treatment products before finally discovering ours? The fact is that clients buy out of desire, the belief and trust that the professional’s recommendations are superior to their own guesswork, the nighttime infomercial, or a department store beauty maven. Product use at home has a far, far greater influence on the skin’s overall condition as clients are treating it themselves twice daily for weeks between those facial appointments. Get it wrong at home and my work is pretty well nullified. Still, products should be suggested if the client could do something better than their current strategy to see the results they use them for. Only through earned respect and inspiration will and should a client feel compelled to purchase the products an esthetician suggests. I will almost certainly want to know what you’re doing at home because that’s going to influence what we’re trying to do with your skin improvement goals. But, this is a decision for the client to make and everyone cares about that differently.

For my interested readers: I’m available for skincare treatments and even a complimentary skin/product evaluation at the following locations by appointment. Come and say hello.

Los Angeles, CA:

www.onaspa.com

Los Gatos, CA

http://www.capriciousspa.com/